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Coronavirus and quarantine measures have posed significant challenges for social movements at a time when governments are taking important decisions on people’s lives as well as living conditions. Citizens experience high degrees of anxiety and uncertainty, brought on by risks to health and economic well-being. As governments scramble to respond to the pandemic, its unequal impact on citizens becomes ever more visible, as do the discrepancies between different nations’ government strategies, their effectiveness, and the degree of legitimacy they elicit from their publics.

Austerity policies following the global financial crash have underfunded health care systems and schools, a problem that has burst into public awareness as hospitals are overcapacity, medical staff have insufficient personal protective equipment (PPE), and schools are struggling to deliver children’s education during lockdown with limited resources. As we face a global depression, this situation is likely to deteriorate further, and millions have already lost their employment.

Citizens and social movements clearly have a lot to discuss, critique, and protest, but how to mobilize when you can’t take to the streets?

Beyond the balcony

The spatial forms of protest and organization have shifted in response to the pandemic’s quarantine restrictions. Some creative protesters, such as those in Israel protesting Netanyahu and the erosion of Israel’s democracy, have observed an entirely new form of “social distancing protests.” But these are the exception, not the norm.

Previously mobilized networks calling attention to economic inequality issues have been reactivated in the face of this new crisis.

Above all, cyberspace has become the main arena for social movements, as digital tools have been used to help activists and citizens communicate, organize, and mobilize. Digital activists circulate tool kits and resources for mutual aid societies geared for the less tech savvy. Activists in a range of social movements resort to a shift in their usual mix of on and offline communication to 100% digital connection, making use of the many apps available to them. Citizens concerned about insufficient government responses or premature release from lockdown take to Twitter with hashtags like #KeepTheLockdown. Critical alternative media activists work to refute coronavirus misinformation and bogus “cures”.

Digital divides

But even the need to revert to digital resources during the lockdown highlights some troubling realities. It reveals the dramatic digital divides between rich and poor, young and old, urban and rural. Unequal access to digital resources means the very communities most affected by the coronavirus are least equipped to respond to it, as they have less access to health or economic support information, less digital literacy to make sense of and navigate it, and less connectivity to protest measures they disagree with or to call attention to their plight.

The global coronavirus pandemic has brought forth new challenges and opportunities for social movements, while making more visible longstanding inequalities and structural problems they have longed mobilized against.

Unequal access to digital resources means the very communities most affected by the coronavirus are least equipped to respond to it.

As the drama unfolds, activists have an opportunity to use the crisis to draw attention to a host of other issues made visible by it, such as our reliance on undervalued care workers and the precarious conditions they work in; the radical drop in air pollution and the reclaiming of our streets by wildlife oblivious to the ravages of the pandemic; the lack of welfare state safety nets and insufficient funding for public services; the problematic nature of proprietary protections for knowledge needed to solve global problems; extreme global socio-economic inequality, and so much more. Coronatime is just beginning.